Free PANTONE conversions

[Gare]

I'm one of the people who used to work in print, therefore at the time, I had to buy the $80 PANTONE swatch book. The book let me try to come up with the closest color in CMYK printing to the actual color in the real world. It's not trivial; 7Up was a client of ours back in the ad agency days, and "7Up green" would absolutely no reproduce accurately, not without a 5th plate and a lot of trapping and stripping and the execs at 7Up wouldn't pay for it.

Today, PANTONE is owned by the very smart and aggressive X-Rite company, and one of their innovations/offerings is an online color spec widget. You use a color field and hue slider (shades of Xara) to specify a color, hit the Submit button and the widget offers several close matches in the PANTONE Color Management system.



Free PANTONE online conversion widget

Hey, it's worth a trip just to play with the thing. I came very close to the colour I sought when I looked at the samples on my screen, and then at the physical swatch book. BTW, you need a fairly well calibrated monitor and viewing conditions to make your matches a little more accurate. When I say this, understand that screen colours are in the additive color model RGB, while inks, CMYK are subtractive colours, so matching perfectly between two opposing colour models is a little like trying to drive a boat on a highway.

But it's the best system we have, I feel.

My Best,

[gwpriester]

It would be really cool if you could upload an image and get a Pantone reference for that, or lacking that, enter an RGB or HSV number and get a Pantone color.

[Gare]

But you can't beat the price for the widget they do offer.

Og

P.S. There's another free site I love that has nothing to do with PANTONE.

Create Your Own Star Wars Crawl...you know, the perspective text at the beginning of the movie?



My Best,

Gary

[Rik]

I had a go at the PANTONE site, Gary.
That's a pretty good find.

However, I really enjoyed the 'Create your own Star Wars crawl...'
(Maybe it's the kid in me!)